Stephen Valentine Patrick William "Steve" Allen (December 26, 1921 –
October 30, 2000) was an American television personality, musician,
composer, actor, comedian, and writer. Though he got his start in radio,
Allen is best known for his television career. He first gained national
attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. He
graduated to become the first host of The Tonight Show, where he
was instrumental in innovating the concept of the television talk show.
Thereafter, he hosted numerous game and variety shows, including The
Steve Allen Show, I've Got a Secret, and The New Steve Allen Show,
and was a regular panel member on CBS' What's My Line? Allen was
a credible pianist and a prolific composer, having penned over 14,000
songs, one of which was recorded by Perry Como and Margaret Whiting,
others by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Les Brown, and Gloria Lynne.
Allen won a Grammy award in 1963 for best jazz composition, with his
song The Gravy Waltz. Allen wrote more than 50 books, has two
stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Hollywood theater named in his
honor. (Click here for full Wikipedia
article)

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Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or
dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be
impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon
ignorance and hope.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject
of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most
important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is
one of monumentally tragic proportions- and should be vigorously opposed.

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's
how I lost my mind.

Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have
destructive consequences.

If God exists, his unlimited power can certainly redress imbalances in
the scale of human justice. But if there is no God, then it is up to man
to be as moral as he can.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital
punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed
tomorrow.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is- holy war.

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray
for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the
absence of prayers.

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In
our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

Is it bigger than a breadbox?

It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain
individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty.

No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one- hundredth
of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity
in the Bible.

Old men miss many dogs.

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not
exist except in our imaginations.

One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part
responsible is anti-Semitism.

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked
businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised
officials improve their bank balances.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the
simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no
right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt.
You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much
light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped
civilize your own specific religion.

The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for
example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic
murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds
of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to
encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free
teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and
evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he
did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and
death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might
have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond
question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en
masse, as non-Christians.

To those who wish to punish others- or at least to see them punished, if
the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands- the
belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

We are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should
resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important
is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the
most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing
laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it:
that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their
professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive
barking-like exhalations.

"I want to give you the bad news first- this program is going to go on forever."-Steve
Allen on the first episode of "Tonight" (later, "The Tonight Show"),
September 27, 1954.

Craig Ferguson ends his ten-year run on CBS' Late Late Show this Friday. His segments with
Robin Williams were always tremendous. In this clip from November 2011, Williams drops by
unannounced to sit in on the nightly e-mail segment. Their off-the-wall conversation gets
a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of the segment.

The Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles celebrated Craig's tenure with a great interview
conducted by Academy Award-winning screenwriter, comic and actor Jim Rash.

John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American
film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplays for most
of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered
classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950),
The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The
Misfits (1961), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). During
his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Oscar nominations, won twice, and
directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston,
to Oscar wins in different films. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

-----

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to
show you any stinkin' badges!

(from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, screenplay by John Huston
from the B. Traven novel. )

Heavy. What is it? The stuff that dreams are made of.(from The
Maltest Falcon)

Hollywood has always been a cage... a cage to catch our dreams.

I don't try to guess what a million people will like. It's hard enough
to know what I like.

I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.

I've lived a number of lives. I'm inclined to envy the man who leads one
life, with one job, and one wife, in one country, under one God. It may
not be a very exciting existence, but at least by the time hes 73 he
knows how old he is.

It's very good for a picture to have an ending before you start
shooting! (on Apocalypse Now)

Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the
right place they're capable of anything.(from Chinatown)

Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an
inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she
isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If
they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And
that's about all there is to it. (on directing)

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual
loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small
world.

We can make good movies or we can make bad movies. The bad movies cost a
bit more, but if they give us enough money, we can make them just as bad
as they want them to be.

Well, if you lose a son it's possible to get another. There's only one
Maltese falcon.(from The Maltest Falcon)

What to do when inspiration doesn't come; be careful not to spook, get
the wind up, force things into position. You must wait around until the
idea comes.

You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently,
at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through
time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a
great nameless procession.

Some of you young folks been saying to me, "Hey Pops, what you mean
'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place?
You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? That ain't
so wonderful either." Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute.
Seems to me, it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to
it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if
only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If
lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And
then this world would be better. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying.Spoken
intro to "What a Wonderful World" (1970 version)

Richard William "Wil" Wheaton III (b. July 29, 1972) is an American
actor, blogger and writer, known for his portrayals of Wesley Crusher on
the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gordie
Lachance in the film Stand by Me, Joey Trotta in Toy Soldiers,
and for his recurring role as a fictionalized version of himself on the
CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

-----

Don’t let the fear of not pleasing someone stop you from being creative.

Either you have a sense of humor about (being a former child star), or
you're in rehab. There's not a lot of gray area.

If the world were a bar, America would currently be the angry drunk
waving around a loaded gun. Yeah, the other people in the bar may be
afraid of him, but they sure as hell don't respect him.

No matter what I do with my life, or how successful I am, I will always
be a socially awkward penguin inside.

Some days, you're just going to be Sideshow Bob, and the world is going
to be a dozen rakes.

When you say a 'former child star,' you may as well say 'failed child
star.'

When I was a little boy, I was called a nerd all the time because I
didn't like sports, I loved to read, I liked math and science, I thought
school was really cool, and... it hurt. A lot. Because it's never ok
when a person makes fun of you for something like you didn't choose...
we don't choose to be nerds. We can't help it that we like these things,
and we shouldn't apologize for liking these things.

I wish that I could tell you that there is a really easy way to just...
not care. But the truth is it hurts. But here's the thing that you might
be able to understand- as a matter of fact, I'm confident you'll be able
to understand this, because you asked this question.

When a person makes fun of you, when a person is cruel to you... it has
nothing to do with you. It's not about what you said, it's not about
what you did, it's not about what you love. It's about them feeling bad
about themselves. They feel sad. They don't get positive attention from
their parents. They don't feel as smart as you. They don't understand
the things that you understand.

Maybe one of their parents is really pushing them to be a cheerleader,
or a baseball player, or an engineer, or something that they just don't
want to do. So they take that out on you, because they can't go and be
mean to the person who's actually hurting them.

So, when a person's cruel to you like that- I know that this is hard-
but honestly, the kind and best reaction is to pity them. And don't let
them make you feel bad because you love a thing. Maybe find out what
they love, and talk about it- how they love it. I bet you'll find out
that a person who loves tetherball loves tetherball exactly the same way
you love Doctor Who. But you just love different things.

And I will tell you this: it absolutely gets better as you get older. I
know it's really hard when you're in school and you're surrounded by the
same 400 people a day that pick on you and make you feel bad about
yourself. But there's fifty thousand people here this weekend who went
through the exact same thing- and we're all doing really well.

Don't you ever let persons make you feel bad because you love something
they decided is only for nerds. You're loving a thing that's for you.-Wil
Wheaton, responding to a question from a young girl at the
2013 Denver Comic Con.

Anna Marie Quindlen (b July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist,
and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private,
won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism
career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and
1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. (Click
for full Wikipedia article.)

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A finished person is a boring person.

Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take
place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character,
your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to
its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied
messages of a timid world.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens.
It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of
feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you
on.

Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

Control is a nice concept, little more.

[Dr. Seuss] is remembered for the murder of Dick and Jane, which was a
mercy killing of the highest order.

For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the
days go slow and the years go fast.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be
an adequate woman?

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It
happens again every single morning.

I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or,
as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a
zone defense instead of man-to-man.

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of
required responsibility.

I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any
marriage are the children who come out of it. We style them as we need
them, to excuse our faults, to insulate ourselves from our own
expendability or indispensability.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of
people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough
bookshelves.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world
but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be
contained.

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which
makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a
woman consists of picking up garbage.

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is
often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their
evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to
their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter
and more compressed.

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one
does the right thing out of fear.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to
acknowledge your existance.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their
friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

We're part of a mixed marriage: he's male, I'm female.

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean.
What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability
to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total
willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me
why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect
and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything- or at
least not well.

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed
to a whole raft of wits.

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest
fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961), often referred to as
C.G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded
analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of
extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective
unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the
study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and
related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not
published until after his death. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

-----

A man who has never passed through the inferno of his passions has never
overcome them.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to
kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Beautiful bodies and beautiful personalities rarely go together.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word
happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be
alcohol or morphine or idealism.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an
understanding of ourselves.

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I
cannot explain as a fraud.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should
first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better
be changed in ourselves.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the
darknesses of other people.

No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of
equivalent intensity.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is
without trouble.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment,
and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.

One cannot live without inconsistency.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing
their own souls.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most
tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight
against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

Reason alone does not suffice.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because
it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's
own being.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally
insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The healthy man does not torture others- generally it is the tortured
who turn into torturers.

The inner voice is at once our greatest danger and an indispensable help.

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but
in our working at it incessantly.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical
substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not
between right and wrong.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell
their stories.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for
living that fits all cases.

There's no coming to consciousness without pain.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and
you will call it fate.

What you resist, persists.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power
predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

"This is Dr. Niles Crane, filling in for my ailing brother, Dr. Frasier
Crane. Although I feel perfectly qualified to fill Frasier's radio
shoes, I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a
Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today."-dialogue
from "Frasier Crane's Day Off," written by James BurrowsSeason
1, episode 23 of the NBC television series "Frasier"

Bob Dylan (b. Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American
musician, singer-songwriter, artist, and writer. He has been an
influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five
decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he
was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of
social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the
Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," became anthems for the US
civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving behind his initial base in
the culture of the folk music revival, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a
Rolling Stone" radically altered the parameters of popular music in
1965. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

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A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at
night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in
common is that they are all going to die.

And don't criticize what you can't understand.

Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people
die in colleges.

Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon't stand in the
doorwayDon't block up the hallFor he that gets hurtWill be
he who has stalledThere's a battle outside and it is ragin'It'll
soon shake your windows and rattle your wallsFor the times they are
a-changin'

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people:
there's saved people and there's lost people.

Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you should
do.

I believe strongly in everyone's right to defend themselves by every
means necessary.

I have no message for anyone. My songs are only me talking to myself.

I once loved a woman, a child I am toldI gave her my heart but she
wanted my soul.But don't think twice, it's all right.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of
responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.

Money doesn't talk, it swears.

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

People dissect my songs like rabbits but they all miss the point.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They
are still being passed around- the music and the ideas.

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean. Sometimes you have
to know what things don't mean.

The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that
before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.

The first way to answer the questions in the song ('Blowin' in the
Wind') is by asking them. But lots of people first have to find the wind.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them.

You can't be wise and in love at the same time.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

How many roads must a man walk downBefore you call him a man?Yes,
'n' how many seas must a white dove sailBefore she sleeps in the
sand?Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannonballs flyBefore
they're forever banned?The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe
answer is blowin' in the wind

How many years can a mountain existBefore it's washed to the sea?Yes,
'n' how many years can some people existBefore they're allowed to be
free?Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his headPretending
he just doesn't see?The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe
answer is blowin' in the wind

How many times must a man look upBefore he can see the sky?Yes,
'n' how many ears must one man haveBefore he can hear people cry?Yes,
'n' how many deaths will it take till he knowsThat too many people
have died?The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the windThe
answer is blowin' in the wind

Craig Ferguson (b. May 17, 1962) is a Scottish-born American television
host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and
voice artist. He is the host of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,
an Emmy Award-nominated, Peabody Award-winning late- night talk show
that has aired on CBS since January, 2005. Ferguson will leave the show
in December, 2014. (Click here for full
Wikipedia article)

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It's hard to stay upIt's been a long, long dayAnd you got the
sandman at the doorBut hang on, leave the TV onAnd let's do it
anywayIt's okay!You can always sleep through work tomorrow, OK?Hey
hey!Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.

Tell the clock on the wallForget the wakeup callCause the
night's not nearly throughWipe the sleep from your eyesGive
yourself a surpriseLet your worries wait another dayAnd if you
stay too late at at the barAt least you made it out this farSo
make up your mind and sayLet's do it anyway!It's okay!You
can always sleep through work tomorrow, okay?Hey hey!Tomorrow's
just your future yesterday.

Life's too short to worry aboutThe things that you can live withoutAnd
I regret to sayThe morning light is hours awayThe world can be
such a frightBut it belongs to us tonightWhat's the point of
going to bed?You look so lovely when your eyes are red!

Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.

The world can be such a frightBut it belongs to us tonightWhat's
the point of going to bed?You look so lovely when your eyes are red!

It's hard to stay upIt's been a long, long dayAnd you got the
sandman at the doorBut hang on, leave the TV onAnd let's do it
anywayIt's okay!You can always sleep through work tomorrow, OK?Hey
hey!Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.Tomorrow's just your
future yesterday.

-----

A junkie will steal your purse, and then help you look for it.

Being guilty tends to engender feelings of guilt.

Change is the nature of God's mind, and resistance to it is the source
of great pain.

Confession is a sacred rite enhanced by allegory, exaggeration, and lies.

Disagreement, vehement disagreement, is healthy. Debate is impossible
without it. Evil does not question itself. Even the incorruptible are
corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken.

Failure is not disgrace. It's just a pitch that you missed, and you'd
better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard
round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by
failing until we don't.

I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie
of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.

I'm always a bit shy around evil people.

If you really don't want gay people to get married, you shouldn't ban
gay marriage, you ban gay divorce.

It's a great day for America, everybody!

It's easier to feel a little more spiritual with a couple of bucks in
your pocket.

Love at first sight is not rare, in fact it is extremely common, it
happens to some people a few times a year. The feeling of 'what if' when
meeting the eyes of a stranger can be love unrecognized.

Maybe fear is God's way of saying, 'Pay attention, this could be fun.'

Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for
me.

The devil is not abroad at night in the form of a cat or a wolf or any
other animal. He lives eternally in the hearts of men.

Time is only linear for engineers and referees.

To most Americans, soccer is like warm hockey.

Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.

White Americans have a very unusual sense of history. They make it up as
they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that
would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that
during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to
stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military
action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named
after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States
less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the
sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.

We were living in Philadelphia in the summer of 1985, and the television
was on as background noise. A "Miami Vice" rerun was airing. I'd caught
a few minutes of the series earlier in the year and, frankly, it wasn't
on my must-see list. Anyway, I was working on something when I heard a
car engine gunned, followed by a hard cut to Tommy Shaw's driving "Girls
With Guns."

I looked up to see a tracking shot of speeding convertible. After a few
seconds, it became obvious the tracking vehicle was a helicopter,
perfectly matching the speed of the auto. I slowly became aware that
there weren't any edits... this was one long honking aerial shot.

It runs for a total of 79 seconds, an eternity in a filmed television
series. I couldn't find many details. The episode, "Glades," was the
ninth in the series' first season. It originally aired on November 30,
1984; I apparently caught the rerun on June 21, 1985. The show was
directed Stan Lathan (who would later go on to direct 122 episodes of
"The Steve Harvey Show"), and the director of photography was Duke
Callahan, who was also the D.P. on the motion picture Conan The
Barbarian. The helicopter pilot and cameraman were uncredited.

The segment starts on the west side of Miami and continues along the
Tamiami Highway. My guess is the director told the stars to drive
themselves to the location that day, and he told the DP to grab a
camera, get a helicopter, and get him some filler because the episode
timed out short.

Or, it could have been a deliberate attempt to create a shot so
impressive an old fart like me would remember it nearly 30 years later
when he accidentally encountered it on the web.

The song as it appears in the film was undoubtedly assembled from
multiple takes and enhanced electronically- a necessity when you're
planning to exhibit it in huge IMAX venues with several thousands watts
of audio amplification.

(YouTube
video: Idina Menzel performs "Let It Go" in "Frozen.")

Frankly, her Oscar performance wasn't her best... having John Travolta
mangle her name didn't help. Think about it- you're following Bette
Midler, you're the last musical performer of the night, singing what
everyone expects to win the Oscar for Best Song, the live
orchestra is in a recording studio over a mile away, and "Let It Go"
(which its authors say was specifically written to be "Idina's Badass
Song") is the Power Ballad from Hell, ranging from F3 to
E♭5.

Go ahead... follow along...

(YouTube
video: Let It Go arranged by Larry Moore)

Anyway, it was nice to see her actually enjoying herself with Fallon and
The Roots.

They used a text-analysis program to measure the tone of articles in USA
Today between 2007 and 2009, and found that especially positive
articles predicted a downturn in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
between a week and a month later. The researchers also analyzed all
twenty-one U.S. Presidential inaugural addresses between 1933 and 2009,
and found that Presidents who waxed optimistic about the future saw a
rise in unemployment and a slowdown in economic growth during their
terms in office. It’s perhaps too strong to suggest that positive
thinking, alone, produced these large macroeconomic changes, but the
staggering results in this most recent paper are consistent with more
than a decade’s worth of studies in Oettingen’s lab. (The
Powerlessness of Positive Thinking)

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Just a reminder- Abe
Vigoda's birthday is tomorrow. Get your party supplies today.

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When the next crisis happens, and by the nature of markets, it will
happen again, the government will do the only rational thing it can, and
once again step in and save the institutions with taxpayer money. The
economy will again be wrecked and the average family will again pay the
costs.

Sid Caesar, a comedic force of nature who became one of television's
first stars in the early 1950s and influenced generations of comedians
and comedy writers, died on Wednesday. He was 91.

Mr. Caesar largely faded from the public eye in his middle years as he
struggled with crippling self-doubt and addiction to alcohol and pills.
But from 1950 to 1954, he and his co-stars on the live 90-minute
comedy-variety extravaganza 'Your Show of Shows' dominated the Saturday
night viewing habits of millions of Americans. In New York, a group of
Broadway theater owners tried to persuade NBC to switch the show to the
middle of the week because, they said, it was ruining their Saturday
business.

Television comedy in its early days was dominated by boisterous veterans
of vaudeville and radio who specialized in broad slapstick and snappy
one-liners. Mr. Caesar introduced a different kind of humor to the small
screen, at once more intimate and more absurd, based less on jokes or
pratfalls than on characters and situations. It left an indelible mark
on American comedy.

'If you want to find the urtexts of 'The Producers' and 'Blazing
Saddles,' of 'Sleeper' and 'Annie Hall,' of 'All in the Family' and
'M*A*S*H' and 'Saturday Night Live,' ” Frank Rich wrote in The New York
Times when he was its chief theater critic, 'check out the old
kinescopes of Sid Caesar.'

A list of Mr. Caesar's writers over the years reads like a comedy
all-star team. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks did some of their earliest
writing for him. So did the most successful playwright in the history of
the American stage, Neil Simon. Carl Reiner created one landmark sitcom,
'The Dick Van Dyke Show;' Larry Gelbart was the principal creative force
behind another, 'M*A*S*H.' Mel Tolkin wrote numerous scripts for 'All in
the Family.' The authors of the two longest-running Broadway musicals of
the 1960s, Joseph Stein ('Fiddler on the Roof') and Michael Stewart
('Hello, Dolly!'), were Caesar alumni as well. (Click
here for the full New York Times obituary.)

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Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little
curlicue at the end.

If I don't believe it, I don't care.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and
enjoyed.

New Year's Eve we got five dollars for the evening- but that was from
eight to unconscious.

The best thing about humor is that it shows people they're not alone.

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented
the other three, he was a genius.

The remote control changed our lives... The remote control took over the
timing of the world. That's why you have road rage. You have people who
have no patience, because you got immediate gratification. You got
click, click, click, click. If it doesn't explode within three seconds,
click click, click.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the
other fellow of a dull one.

When I did comedy I made fun of myself.If there was a buffoon, I played
the buffoon. And people looked at me and said, 'Gee, that's like Uncle
David', or 'That's like a friend of mine'. And they related through
that. I didn't make fun of them. I made fun of me.

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 - August 16, 1977) was an American
singer, musician, and actor. One of the most significant cultural icons
of the 20th century, he is often referred to as "The King of Rock and
Roll", or simply, "The King". Presley is one of the most celebrated
musicians of 20th century. Commercially successful in many genres,
including pop, blues and gospel, he is the best-selling solo artist in
the history of recorded music. He was nominated for 14 Grammys and won
three, receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36. He has
been inducted into multiple music halls of fame. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

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Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.

Don't let your head get too big, it'll break your neck.

Don't criticize what you don't understand, son. You never walked in that
man's shoes

I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and
something to look forward to.

I don't feel I'll live a long life. That's why I have to get what I can
from every day.

I don't know anything about music. In my line, you don't have to.

I have no use for bodyguards, but I have a very special use for two
highly trained certified public accountants.

I was training to be an electrician. I suppose I got wired the wrong way
round somewhere along the line.

I'd never do anything vulgar before an audience. My mother wouldn't
permit it.

Music should be something that makes you gotta move, inside or outside.

My voice is ordinary. If I stand still while I'm singing, I might as
well go back to driving a truck.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it
you have it all over.

Singers come and go, but if you're a good actor, you can last a long
time.

Talent is being able to sell what you're feeling.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It's very hard to
live up to an image.

The Lord can give, and the Lord can take away. I might be herding sheep
next year.

The only thing worse than watchin' a bad movie is bein' in one.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when
he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well
spent.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't
goin' away.

When things go wrong, don't go with them.

When you're a celebrity, people treat you nicer. The bad part is, they
also tell you what they think you want to hear, which ain't always the
truth.

You only pass through this life once; you don't come back for an encore.

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Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century.
He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a
whole new social revolution- the 60s comes from it.-Leonard
Bernstein

We're the Axis of Elvis.-John Lileks

America is Elvis Presley- the most beautiful, talented, rebellious
nation in the history of Earth. And now, you're in your Vegas years.
You've squeezed yourself into a white jumpsuit, you're wheezing your way
through 'Love Me Tender' and you might be about to pass away bloated on
the toilet. But you're still the King.-John Oliver

He was a unique artist… an original in an area of imitators.-Mick
Jagger

A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man's music,
when in fact almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage
mannerisms from Elvis.-Jackie Wilson

Festivus, a well-celebrated parody, has become a secular holiday
celebrated on December 23 which serves as an alternative to
participating in the pressures and commercialism of the Christmas
holiday season. Originally a family tradition of scriptwriter Dan
O'Keefe working on the American sitcom Seinfeld, the holiday
entered popular culture after it was made the focus of a 1997 episode of
the program. The holiday's celebration, as it was shown on Seinfeld,
includes a Festivus dinner, an unadorned aluminum "Festivus pole,"
practices such as the "Airing of Grievances" and "Feats of Strength,"
and the labeling of easily explainable events as "Festivus miracles."

Hector Hugh Munro (December 18, 1870 - November 13, 1916), better known
by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H.H. Munro, was a British
writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirized
Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short
story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by
Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling, his work influenced A.A. Milne,
Noël Coward, and P.G. Wodehouse. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

Saki was one of the authors presented by my high school English teacher,
Ira Handelsman. He had a wonderful method of insuring his students were
familiar with the material: he read the stories, aloud, to the class. I
vividly recall his presentation of Sredni Vashtar, which, at
least in my memory, was as riveting as this performance by Tom Baker:

Ira did not have an English accent, but he had precise diction and a
voice perhaps best described in contemporary terms as serious NPR
announcer-ish. Even the densest of jocks in the class fell silent as the
story continued. At its conclusion, Ira received, if not applause,
several grunts of approval.

Thus began my appreciation of H.H. Munro.

And my dislike of ferrets.

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A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat
that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't
respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage
to do both.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child
will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject
submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.

Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted
calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return.

He is one of those persons who would be enormously improved by death.

His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

I hate babies. They're so human.

I hate posterity- it's so fond of having the last word.

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing
it is that they never try to talk English.

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so
desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be
living apart.

In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take
mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man
does not vote for anything but against something.

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic
conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the
modern conveniences of the other.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have
reminiscences of what never happened.

There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whom
you simply loathe. That is really the crying need of our modern
civilization.

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing
indiscretions of other people.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself
makes one want to break most of the Commandments.